Ten years later, still the same malware?

At Blackhat2011 during an interview about ESET'S recent Global Threat Report, a reporter asked me why we still see very old strains of common, long-detected malware. After all, haven't we detected these threats in the wild for years by now?

AES crypto broken by 'groundbreaking' attack

Cryptographers have discovered a way to break the Advanced Encryption Standard used to protect everything from top-secret government documents to online banking transactions.


Biclique Analysis allows 2 bits to be knocked off the key, speeding up brute force attacks by up to 5 times.


It still takes a little longer than you'll be around (trillions of years) to crack a 256 key this way. But they're well on the way.

Anonymous is not unanimous

From a Pastebin post titled: Anonymous is not Unanimous.

Anonymous has a perception problem. Most people think we're a group of shadowy hackers. This is a fundamental flaw. Anonymous is *groups* of shadowy hackers, and herein lies the problem. Anonymous has done a lot of good in just the past 9 months. It has helped with other groups in providing aid to people on the ground in countries where "democracy" is a bad word.

The mainstream media needs to understand that Anonymous isn't unanimous. I've yet to see wide scale reporting make this distinction. A destructive minority is getting a majority of the press, while those of us who toil in the shadow doing good work for people at home and abroad go unthanked.

BART protestors didn't spring up out of thin air this week. Protests against BART have been ongoing for years. Where's the media coverage? If the media paid more attention to peaceful protests and general social unrest, I think hackers would be far less inclined to do things such as leaking data just to get the attention of the press.

Finally, hacking isn't just about breaking into web servers and leaking data to the public. Far from it. Hacking is just as much about breaking out of things as it is about breaking into things. Hacking is lifestyle, and a mindset. It is about learning more about the technologies we use and social norms we are subject to.

Don't let the actions of a few skew your perception of hackers as a whole.

@AnonyOps

Pakistan Let China See Crashed U.S. "Stealth" Helicopter

Pakistan gave China access to the previously unknown U.S. "stealth" helicopter that crashed during the commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May despite explicit requests from the CIA not to, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

"Spam King" Surrenders.

Sanford Wallace, a.k.a. "the Spam King," has surrendered to federal law

enforcement agents in California. Wallace has been charged with sending

millions of spam messages to Facebook users. He allegedly tricked users

into submitting their account login details. An estimated 500,000

Facebook accounts were compromised. Once he had access to compromised

accounts, he accessed their friends lists and posted junk messages on

their walls. Facebook won a US $711 million judgment against Wallace in

2009. Wallace faces charges of electronic mail fraud, intentional damage

to a protected computer and criminal contempt. He has been released

after posting US $100,000 bail.

I doubt many people are feeling sorry for him.

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